Explore "The Inverted Pyramid" by Bertrand W. Sinclair on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
The quality of persistence in the face of difficulties is one that men are variously endowed with. Hope revives in some breasts sooner than in others. To some the spur of a desire, a need, a conviction, never ceases wholly to rowel them into action. They cannot for long accept defeat or frustration as final. For such, the line of least resistance is closed. Reason, logic, all the chances of success may be against them, but they strive with infinite patience and unflagging courage toward a given end.
Rod Norquay had quite clearly defined Mary Thorn as a given end. Sometimes in analytical mood he took stock of his feelings about her and marveled at the depth and intensity, the consistent urge of this desire. A flare of impatience would burn up. He would be angry with Mary awhile, then sorry for himself. It was, he held, a strange way for a woman to feel -- to love a man, to admit frankly that he satisfied her ideal of a man, that her flesh yearned to his after the law of nature -- yet to fear, to hold back from the decisive step because of -- -- What? Social differences? Rod dismissed them with a gesture. They existed, but they did not matter. What then? An unexplained reluctance to give up her freedom? Some undivulged ambition? A secret desire to try her own individual wings before they were clipped by marriage?